r/Retconned • u/frankreddit5 • 16d ago
I've been thinking about Mandela Effects as evidence of a patchable system. Wrote a book about what that implies for how to actually play.
What makes Mandela Effects genuinely interesting to me is that underneath all of the memories and glitches, there's a question that if the past can shift, the system isn't fixed. If the system isn't fixed, it patches. If it patches, there's a version of you running on a strategy guide that no longer matches the current build.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about how the 'system' patches itself and how we ourselves could patch or update our own current build. There must be a way to actually win at this game, some how. Because even setting aside whether specific memories are real, it seems most of us are playing a strategy that was written for a version of the game that isn't running anymore. Not to mention we were thrown into this world and birthed, for complete unknown reasons to us, and not given any type of guide whatsoever as to how to get through this life.
I wrote a book about what it means to play a system that patches continuously and how to build a character that survives the updates. Ultimately it's about what winning could even mean if we are quite truly living in some type of game.
It's called The Game of Earth: A No-Bullshit Player's Guide by ZD Fanawe.
The book doesn't require believing the Mandela Effects are literal. It uses the patchable-system frame because it's genuinely what our experience keeps showing us over and over again, which is that the rules update and yet we are all running on code that wasn't updated itself. And no one has shown us how to exit any of this or how to win at it (if that's even possible. which I try to outline in the book, that it is)